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Novel shares a valuable lesson also

By CONNIE SMITH
The Free Lance-Star

Date published: 9/9/2001

In Annie Wang's "Lili: A Novel of Tiananmen," we meet Lili just after she gets out of prison for hooliganism.

She encrusts herself with a "don't give a s---" attitude that distances her at first from our sympathies. But as her story unfolds, her poetic soul thoroughly captivates even the most jaded.

When she and Roy, an American journalist, meet and begin their long relationship, they learn from each other in surprising and profound ways, always alive through Wang's exquisite use of language.

To say this is to heap praise on Annie Wang, who has written more than 1,000 pieces in China from the age of 14. This is her first novel in English. Her poetic sensibility makes her prose redolent with pure beauty. She has a genius for simile and metaphor.

For example, Lili decides to play music for money at a hotel for rich patrons. Her parents, both serious musicians who have been persecuted during the Cultural Revolution, could hardly be more shocked if she prostituted herself. But she dusts off her erhu, a Chinese violin, and plucks a sound. "The sound is the cry of an ancient concubine, abandoned by her king for ages. I am the king who has dumped my erhu concubine. But she has waited patiently for my return."

The notes of her erhu when she visits Mongolia "penetrate the open air, flying boundless, like nightingales." A memory departs "like a whiff of fading fragrance." A couple strolls "hand in hand, like a pair of lost schoolchildren."

Her prose evokes a rich Chinese mode of seeing, but Lili is no passive stereotype. She is cynical, gutsy and very real. Her doubts about herself and about the world slowly dissolve as she reluctantly comes to love Roy. She struggles with his preconceptions of China, his western linear and dualistic thinking, his idealism and what she calls his naivete.

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Date published: 9/9/2001